Maggie Koerth-Baker

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net. From August 2014-May 2015, she will be a Nieman-Berkman Fellow at Harvard University. You can follow Maggie's adventures in the Ivory Tower by subscribing to The Fellowship of Three Things newsletter.

This account of the 19th-century debate over whether or not the word "scientist" is accurate and pleasing to hear is a great reminder that some of the best history stories are the ones you don't even think to ask about.

In 2010, construction crews found the hull of a very old ship, buried at the site of the World Trade Center towers. Using dendrochronology, scientists now know how old the ship is and what city it was made in.

One of the reasons that Ebola is so deadly is that it has multiple ways of interfering with or avoiding the human immune system. While the virus is busy destroying the human body, the immune system is either still in the process of discovering that there is a problem, or is in such disarray that it would be next to impossible to mobilize a unified effort to fight off the invader.

N'Da Alphonse grows cocoa in Ivory Coast. He harvests the pods, removes the pulp-covered beans, and dries them before selling them to brokers. He'd never seen or tasted the food made from his beans, until a Dutch TV show brought him a sample, as part of a story on class divisions and the global food trade.

The answer is more complicated than simply missing a dose, or failing to take your birth control at just the right time each day. Scientists are just beginning to understand how individual differences in body chemistry can affect how well the Pill works.

Here's a really fascinating example of the interconnectedness of life and the importance of viewing things as systems, rather than individual events. The Bahamas are, underwater, giant mounds of calcium carbonate, part of the even larger Great Bahama Bank. That Bank, as it turns out, is not the result of local coral growth, but, instead, owes its existence to a chemistry experiment that begins in Africa's Sahara desert.

In short the authors show that when Sahara dust arrives in the Bahamas cyano-bacteria, what we used to call blue-green algae, bloom. As they bloom their photosynthesis removes CO2 from the water making the pH locally rise, alleviating ocean acidification. That blooming rise of ocean pH to a slightly more alkaline state results in what the Bahamanian’s have long called “Ocean Whitings” where the ocean becomes white like milk.

The whiting of the ocean is the result of white calcium carbonate precipitating out of solution as a solid mineral which sinks to the sea floor and accumulates in massive amounts. On the sea bed it looks like tiny pellets. That’s because it’s been reprocessed by marine worms.

Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, a hero who has treated hundreds of people in the recent deadly outbreak, is in a Doctors Without Borders isolation ward after working at a hospital where three nurses had previously died of the virus.